I agree with this take... for now. I wouldn't be surprised if the AI agents improved exponentially (in the next few years) to the point where his statement is no longer true.
I truly don’t know how this is going to play out. Will the software industry just be a total mess until agents can actually replace developers? Or will companies come to their senses and learn that they still need to hire humans - just humans that know how to use agents to augment their work?
If AI can't replace developers, companies can't replace developers with it. They can try — and then they'll be met with the reality. Good or bad
Bingo.
And it’s causing the careers of a majority of juniors to experience fatal delays. Juniors need to leap into their careers and build up a good head of steam by demonstrating acquired experience, or they will wander off into other industries and fail to acquire said experience.
And when others who haven’t even gone through training yet see how juniors have an abysmally hard time finding a job, this will discourage them from even considering the industry before they ever begin to learn how to code.
But when no-one is hiring such that even students reconsider their career choice, this “failure to launch” will cause a massive developer shortage in the next 5-15 years, to the point where I believe entire governments will have this as a policy pain point.
After all, when companies are loathe to actually conduct any kind of on-the-job training, and demand 2-5 years of experience in an whole IT department’s worth of skills for “entry level” jobs, an entire generation of potential applicants with a fraction of that (or none at all) will cause the industry to have figurative kittens.
I mean, it will be the industry’s own footgun that has hurt them so badly. I would posit it may even become a leggun. The schadenfreude will be copious and well-deserved. But it’s going to produce massive amounts of economic pain.
Junior devs at least have the option of building a portfolio of usefully software on their own machine at home, while eating ramens.
They can build websites for mom'n'pop stores. They can participate into open source projects. Etc, etc...
I dread the people who won't get jobs into other fields because managers have been told by corporate that "we don't need people, chatgpt can do everything".
For many, even cutting their budget isn’t enough to pursue what you’re describing. Modern careers in software are very hard to reach for people who can’t afford to wait for a real paycheck, and it drives away a massive group of potential talent.
Bold of you to assume today’s young adults can live without a steady paycheque that doesn’t suck up 40-80hrs of their time a week. I mean, how else will that roof end up over their heads?
And most parents have been brainwashed to believe that any child not living on their own once they become adults are failures, and still need to be kicked out of the house such that they are forced to learn self-sufficiency.
AFAICT, most parents of adult offspring have zero clue about how bad things actually are out there, with most still telling their children to go from business to business with printed-off Résumés. Outside of blue-collar jobs, I haven’t seen this work for a good twenty years, now.
My point is that a luxury of the software engineering craft is that you can practice "at pro level" very cheaply. Even as a teenager, learning and using vscode/python/react/etc... on your own is a possibility.
Learning Salesforce and SAP and the internal support tool of BigCo is not.
That being said, I completely agree that we're going to put a generation of "wannabee white collar" in a dire situation. Cynically, this might be an overdue correction from the years of "college degree for everyone", and maybe (just maybe) some people will actually thrive in the "hard-to-llm-ize" profession if they can retrain.
(If the market laws apply, someone will build "turn advertisement-copy writers into electricians", and it would not necessarily be for the worst ? I know, easy to tell for me, who got the opposite deal by being a software engineer on demand at the right time at the beginning of my career.)
The 80/20 rule is a painful lesson to internalize but it’s damn near a universal constant now. That last exponential improvement that takes LLMs over the finish line will take a lot longer than we think.
It's an aftermarket system, but can be installed in most newish cars with a built in lane guidance system. Even a Corolla. And it's really want we want. It's not self-driving, it'll just take you down the freeway and you don't have to do anything except wait for your GPS to tell you to exit (and then you have to exit). Freeway-grade gurves in the road? Fine. Stop and go traffic? Handled. It's better than Tesla's FSD in two specific ways. One is that because it's not self-driving, it's way easier to trust the system because it's not going to change lanes or anything surprising on you. It's not going to do something fancy, just brake or accelerate or follow the lane or car in front of you left or right. I highly recommend it to anyone who does any amount of freeway driving. If not for the coolness of it then simply the safety aspect. Now, I'm sure everyone here is a better driver than most (though that has a problem, mathematically), but this thing is better than a tired/angry/drunk version of someone else driving.
But as you point out, most people are still driving their own cars.
Which, I think is where we're going to see the software development industry going. There's gonna be the AI maximalists, who, like Waymo and FSD, will have AI basically do everything. And then there's the pragmatists, for whom AI doesn't do everything, just enough to be useful.
Then there's everyone else, still writing their own code. Thing is, an app on your computer isn't a car. It's $20/month if not free if you're a total cheapskate, to get codex or claude or another assistant, vs many thousands of dollars for a self-driving or partially self-driving car. The other difference is in time. The value of a partially self-driving car (FSD or Comma) is in the mental fatigue of driving, and in improved safety, but a 7 hour road trip is still going to take 7 hours even if you're not driving. The only time a self-driving car helps is if you're going cross-city in a Waymo, and you're in the back seat working on your laptop. AI assisted coding though is different. If I take on projects I wouldn't do before with AI, that's a win for me. If I'm able to write software faster and with fewer bugs with AI, that's also a win for me, but also a win for my employer. If, however, it goes the other way and I write more bugs, then that's a loss for me and my employer.
And what do they run on? Information. The production of which is throttled by the technology itself, in part because the salespeople claim it can (and should) "replace" workers and thinkers, in part because many people have really low standards for entertainment and accept so called slop instead of cheap tropes manually stitched together.
So it would seem unlikely that they'll get the required information fed into them that would be needed for them to outpace the public internet och and widely pirated books and so on.
I am not worried about losing my programming role to AI.
I am worried about hiring employees and contractors. I haven’t had to hire anyone i office since, but I have specially avoided Upwork and new contractors. It’s too hard to tell if anyone knows anything anymore.
Everyone has the right or right enough answers for an interview or test.
The bar to detect bullshit has been moved deeper into the non-detectable range. It’s like everyone has open-book testing for interviews.
Even if I can sus out who is full of shit in a video or phone interview… the number of people I need to sort through is too large to be effective.
For Upwork specifically, this was an issue for years already. With people buying US accounts and lying about their location or subcontracting to cheaper foreign labor.
So, is vibe coding something I want to hire? Absolutely not. But, I don’t see being able to avoid it or at least not suffering from someone cutting corners.